“Joel Achenbach, a science and politics reporter, once asked why “many reasonable people doubt science.” He should look at his own reporting on alcohol research for the possible explanation. Despite decades of overwhelming evidence that moderate drinking confers health benefits, Achenbach’s August 3 Washington Post piece asserts that the evidence is “murky.” The basis for the assertion seems to come from a single study published in April in the journal The Lancet. Not only is a single study insufficient to challenge three decades of research, but Achenbach (along with reporters at other major news outlets) completely misunderstood the what this study found.”

Posted onApril 25, 2018|Comments Off on From The Lancet: Guidelines on Maximum Alcohol Consumption May Be Too High

No, I haven’t read the whole thing. You go first.

“The main finding of this analysis was that the threshold for lowest risk for all-cause mortality was about 100 g per week. For men, we estimated that long-term reduction of alcohol consumption from 196 g per week (the upper limit recommended in US guidelines) to 100 g per week or below was associated with about 1–2 years of longer life expectancy at age 40 years. Exploratory analyses suggested that drinkers of beer or spirits, as well as binge drinkers, had the highest risk for all-cause mortality.”

My wife rarely drinks alcohol, but she does enjoy a good mojito. So I decided to learn how to make one. I learned a new term with this project: muddle. I didn’t have a dedicated muddler so I used the thick tip of a spatula handle instead.

This recipe serves two. For one serving, just reduce everything by half.

Ingredients:

3 Tbsp sugar (4 if you like things a little sweeter)

3 Tbsp water

20 fresh mint leaves

1 lime cut into small wedges

4 fl oz white rum

4 oz club soda (or seltzer?)

Directions:

Make a syrup by putting the water and sugar in a small saucepan and warm on the stove over medium heat, stirring intermittently until sugar dissolves. Just takes 1–2 minutes. Set it aside to cool.

Put the mint leaves in the bottom of a small pitcher or large thick glass (I used a 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup) then add the lime wedges. Muddle together gently for 20–30 seconds until the juice is released from the limes.

Add your syrup, rum, and club soda to the container holding the mint and lime. Stir briefly.

Fill two large glasses (2-cup capacity) with ice and pour half of your mix into each. Top off with additional club soda if desired. Enjoy responsibly.

I’ve altered the original article’s headline because it’s misleading, making it sound like it’s proven that red wine improves dental health in humans. But the allegations are hypothetical, based on polyphenol content of wine. Click below for the minimal details.

Prospective studies, which are generally considered to be more rigorous than cross-sectional studies and which follow groups of people over time, in this case from several months to 20 years, had varied results and produced “no clear picture” of the relationship between alcohol and weight. Several found either no relationship or a negative relationship, at least in women, while others found that men who drank tended to risk becoming obese, especially if they were beer drinkers.

The conclusion from the most recent such studies: While heavy drinkers risked gaining weight, “light to moderate alcohol intake is not associated with weight gain or changes in waist circumference.”

Parker here. “Light to moderate” drinking would be up to one drink a day for women or two a day for men, on average.

You can even lose excess body weight without deleting alcohol from your diet, as in the Ketogenic Mediterranean Diet.

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Posted onJanuary 1, 2017|Comments Off on Death By Alcohol Is Increasingly Popular Among White Women in U.S.

Perhaps she should reconsider

Did you wake up with a hangover today?

From the Washington Post:

“Drinking is killing twice as many middle-aged white women as it did 18 years ago.

Generally, middle age (age 35 to 54) is not the time to die in modern societies. It is past teenage dangers, before the serious perils of age, and improved medical care and public-health campaigns are keeping more people alive.

So why are middle-aged white women dying more often even while death rates for other groups continue to go down? What are white women doing that is so different?

“The Washington Post has spent the year crossing the country to look into causes and repercussions of the strange increase in deaths among middle-aged white women and men. Alcohol, opioids and suicide are important factors. See the full coverage here.”